by Agatha Frost
“You were?” Julia swallowed the upwelling of guilt for pondering if Vicky’s presence was affecting her bottom line. “I wish I could say I was just here for a friendly chat, but from one service woman to another, I’ll be honest and tell you that I’m here on neighbourhood watch business.” She held up the scones. “I did bring a bribe, though. Freshly baked last night.”
Whether Vicky had been planning to take a fifteen-minute break, Julia didn’t know, but she appreciated when Vicky slid down the shutter after serving the queue that had formed after Julia. She put a ‘Be Right Back!’ sign next to the sugar sachets before motioning for Julia to join her around the back of the van. It wasn’t a kitchen, but the area between the van and the thick oak tree created a lovely shaded place to take a break, weather permitting.
“Is coffee alright?” Vicky passed her a polystyrene cup.
“Thank you.”
After settling on two upturned plastic crates, Vicky unpacked a scone onto her lap and put the three ingredients together. She took a bite, and her lids fluttered before she immediately licked her lips. Julia sipped the coffee and tried to hold in her cough. It was somehow burnt and too weak all at once, but she smiled all the same.
“I’ve been wondering where I could get my hands on these,” Vicky said through a mouthful. “I’ve seen people carrying them up and down the street all week.”
From the numbers alone, Julia knew the scones were flying off the shelves, but since she wasn’t working in the café, she hadn’t witnessed them out in the wild. She’d eaten more than her fair share; the perks of café ownership.
“I should have known they’d be yours,” said Vicky after another bite. “I’ve always enjoyed your baking.”
“And here I thought it was my job to flatter you.”
“It’s true.” Vicky laughed. “I admired your café a lot. Part of the reason I started this van, actually. I always liked the idea, and one day, I just thought, why not? And here I am. You’ve been so nice about it, too. Plenty to go around, isn’t there?”
Julia nodded. She’d experienced suffocating competition in the form of a chain coffee shop once before, but that had been, albeit briefly, on the other side of the green and stealing her customers out from under her nose. Before it had closed, she’d wondered if she could continue, and she’d been nowhere near that since Vicky’s Van parked up.
As long as Vicky didn’t permanently move the van to the green.
“So, what’s going on?” Vicky asked after devouring her first scone. “I haven’t been keeping up with everything. I imagine things have fallen apart a bit since Penelope died.”
“You could say that.”
“Sounds like I got out at the right time.”
“Then what you just said makes more sense.” Julia laughed. “I haven’t joined that group. It’s a new group. It’s a long story, but we’ve somehow found ourselves trying to solve Penelope’s murder.”
“Do neighbourhood watch groups do that?”
“My gran’s does.”
“Well, I’m sorry I can’t help you there,” Vicky said with a shrug. “I left weeks ago. Haven’t been to any meetings. I’ve been kept out of the loop.”
“So, you have no idea what they were all arguing about in the village hall before Penelope’s death?”
Tight-lipped as she cut open another scone, Vicky shook her head. A dead end. Of all the people to be interviewed, she’d landed the suspect who wasn’t even part of the group anymore. Technically, she’d volunteered on account of vaguely knowing Vicky, but only because she was part of the Peridale’s Eyes.
“Were you close to Penelope?” she asked, sensing an opportunity to get to know the victim better.
“Oh, we were friends,” she said, with a nod. “For years, until . . . Well, I suppose we were always friends. We never really had a falling out, as such, but it’s just different when you’re no longer in the group that brought you together so often.”
A cold prickle tinged her warm voice.
“And you left to focus on this?”
“I quickly realised I couldn’t do both.” Vicky slapped the metal van. “There were no hard feelings or anything.”
Julia hadn’t asked or suggested there were.
“What was Penelope like?” Julia asked, not trying to focus too hard on Vicky’s face. “I was only ever on her receiving end. I didn’t know much about the real woman.”
Vicky took her time chewing, her distant gaze fixed somewhere on the trunk of the tree.
“She used to be an accountant,” Vicky began, returning the rest of the second scone to the box. “She retired a little later than I want to, and then jumped right in and started Peridale’s Eyes. She was really passionate about it.”
“Passionate is one word for it.”
“I’ve been around since the first meeting,” Vicky said, gaze once again distant. “We became quite friendly at water aerobics, and she asked me to join. I didn’t have a business then. Hardly exciting, is it? And the neighbourhood watch was exciting . . . at first. But it changed.”
“Changed how?”
“It got really serious,” Vicky whispered, clasping her fingers around her knee and glancing around as if they might somehow be overheard. “Penelope was always the leader, but she wasn’t controlling. And then one day, she started treating it like a job. I thought she’d get bored, but she tightened her grip. She became obsessed with the strangest things. Like your parking, and people’s garden fences being two inches out of property lines. I didn’t enjoy all of that so much. We used to just . . . keep an eye on things. Lost cats, people in need, that sort of thing. Friendly neighbourhood stuff.”
“And none of that made you want to leave before the coffee van?”
Vicky’s gaze shifted from the tree to Julia. The alertness in her expression while she said nothing made Julia shift on the plastic crate. Everything Vicky said would have been fine information to take back to her gran. It would have ticked a box that technically shouldn’t have been a box to begin with. But what Julia saw in Vicky’s demeanour conflicted with what she was hearing.
Could it be grief?
The lines around Vicky’s eyes softened as she snapped back to bubbly attention.
“We were friends,” she said with a shrug, checking her phone. “I tried to stand by her, but she didn’t always make it easy. Listen, I need to get back. I have an hour of good trade left.”
“Absolutely.” Julia stood up with the coffee she’d barely touched. “I’ve already taken enough of your time. I appreciate it.”
“Any time.”
“There’s one more thing,” she said, following Vicky to the door at the side of the van. “I saw a slender young man leaving flowers at Penelope’s – Well, it’s not hers. Where she was . . . struck. I think I saw him laying flowers, at least. Any idea who that could be?”
“Slender?” Vicky shook her head. “Not off the top of my head, no. There’s Desmond and Gus, but only one is slender and neither are young.”
“Desmond?”
“You know Des?”
“No, but it seems you do. He’s in the group, isn’t he?”
Vicky nodded and stepped into the van. A line was already forming.
“Penelope’s first husband.”
“So, he wasn’t in the group?”
“I know how it looks,” Vicky said, lifting the shutter. “First husband and second husband in the same group? But they all got along fine. I think Des and Penelope ended on good terms. If you want to talk to him, he’s just started part time at the library.”
Carrying the coffee, Julia walked halfway back up the street before turning to look over her shoulder. Though her long-distance vision wasn’t the best, she was sure Vicky was watching her. She turned to the shop she’d lingered outside of to disguise it by browsing, but of course she’d chosen to stop outside Trotter’s Books boarded up window.
A distraction appeared as her father crossed the street towards her with a giddy s
pring in his step. He waved.
“Up to trouble?” he asked, pulling her into a bigger hug than usual. “Of course you are.”
“Something like that. Little early for closing the antique shop, isn’t it?
“I have an important meeting.” He tugged at his crisp white collar and ran his fingers through his thick, blown-back hair. “I might as well tell you. I don’t know how we’ve been keeping it secret for so long, but you know what Katie is like.”
Brian paused to build tension, giving Julia just enough time to invent a genuine reaction to the second-hand news.
“We’ve had an offer on the manor.”
“Oh wow!” she cried, slapping his arm. “That’s amazing news!”
“Katie already told you, didn’t she?”
“That obvious?”
“It was the eyes.” He peered at her face. “Your mum used to look the same whenever she was trying to get one over on me. Usually when she was planning my birthday parties.”
Julia smiled, still touched by the flowers he’d left by her grave. She wanted to ask about the occasion, but the gesture of visiting and talking about her was enough; it hadn’t always been so easy for him.
“Things are finally looking up!” He beamed through a toothy grin. “All our worries are about to be over. We’ll have enough to pay off the debt, and maybe even—”
“Dad,” she interjected, resting her palm on his soft cheek. “Promise me you won’t rush into anything?”
“When have I ever?” He gave her another tight squeeze that lifted her slightly off the ground. “Don’t worry about a thing. Everything is about to get a whole lot better. Brian South is coming back.”
Before she could ask where he’d been, the Brian South she’d grown accustomed to as of late hurried up the lane. Julia hoped he heeded her warning. Though he hadn’t started the sinkhole of debt at the manor, his attempts at secretly fixing it had only made things worse.
Following in her father’s footsteps, she made her way to the top of the lane. She sipped the coffee out of habit, but it went straight into a bin when she rounded the corner.
Staring down at Vicky’s logo printed on the side of the small cup, Julia couldn’t shake the feeling she’d just been lied to.
Kept me out of the loop.
No hard feelings.
I tried to stand by her.
Good friends parting on good terms, Vicky had claimed, but Julia suspected another version of events was scribbled between the lines. Part of Peridale’s Eyes Vicky might no longer have been, but she had still given Julia plenty to think about.
And now she knew where to find Desmond Newton.
7
L ater that evening, gravel crunched under Julia’s feet as she paced in the shadow of Wellington Manor. She stuck the phone high towards the clear sky, though from what she could see on the screen, the sudden drop in video quality wasn’t her doing.
“Go back to the window,” she called, unsure if Jessie was receiving her. “Back to the . . . window . . . window . . . Can you even hear me?”
Jittery pixels formed and dragged around the vague shape of a face like something pulled from Picasso’s nightmares. All at once, it snapped into high-definition focus, the signal-ghost chased from the machine.
“Muuuuum?” Jessie moaned, as though she’d been saying it on loop. “Can you hear me now?”
“Yes!” she said. “Stay right there.”
Jessie curled up cross-legged by the large corner windows, and when she settled, the light balance adjusted. With it came Julia’s first clear look at the view through the windows.
“You alright, Mum?” Jessie asked, pulling her knees up. “You look like you’re about to start drooling or something.”
“The view,” she said, trying to peer past Jessie. “It’s so flat I almost didn’t know what I was looking at.”
A glance over the edge of her own phone revealed the rolling Cotswolds hills in every direction. When she looked back at the screen, the camera had flipped to focus on the window, and Jessie gave her a sweeping panoramic view of the flat cityscape stretching as far as she could see.
“We’re right by the water,” she said, zooming in on water cutting through the city. “It’s pretty swanky.”
Jessie turned the camera back onto her face as she flopped into a soft-looking brown leather armchair. The video jittered, but only for a second.
Apparently, five months was all it took for a nineteen-year-old to shape an identity different in so many ways to the one Julia had hugged goodbye.
“New piercings?” Julia asked, moving in closer to count the gold studs and rings glittering up Jessie’s ears.
“Tragus in Amsterdam,” she pulled at one. “These two studs in Paris.” She flapped her lobes and flipped her hair away. She pulled her ear forward to show a black ring in the top of the other. “Got this one this morning. Hurts like hell, but it looks cool.”
Cool.
Julia couldn’t disagree with that.
Relaxed, too.
“You’re going to run out of space before you’ve even left Europe.”
Julia turned to the kitchen window, through which she could see Sue with Olivia, the twins, and Vinnie all on her own. She waved ‘two minutes’ with her fingers and turned away before the guilt dragged her back inside. She hadn’t managed to get Jessie on a video call all week. Even with so little a difference in time zone, they were living such different lives . . . and on such different schedules.
“We’re going east after the first six months,” Jessie said, yawning, dragging down her skin to check her undereye bags in the camera. “Then we’re looping right back around. Do I look tired?”
“You’re a teenager, so yes.”
“Not for much longer,” she said, wiggling a finger in her ear as though digging for something. “Birthday in two weeks.”
“And you still haven’t given me your address so I can send you something.”
“Who knows where we’ll be in two weeks.” Jessie shrugged. “And you don’t have to. It’s not an important birthday.”
Julia couldn’t find the words to describe how important and life-changing the upcoming decade would be for Jessie, but it didn’t matter. Julia wasn’t sure anything she said would sink into her daughter’s tired brain; she’d been yawning for most of the call.
“Went to an insane nightclub last night,” Jessie said, looking through the window and off into the city. “Alfie knew the DJ and got us into VIP. Ended in a fight though.”
“You didn’t.”
“You always assume the worst of me.” Jessie rolled her eyes. “It was Alfie.”
That wasn’t any better. Julia was trusting Jessie’s older brother, a seasoned traveller, to stop things like fights from happening, not to wade into them.
“Just make sure you’re staying—”
Jessie’s eyes darted over the top of the phone as what sounded like a door opened somewhere in the apartment. She smiled before looking down and appearing to realise she was still on camera.
“Love you,” she whispered into the microphone. “Gotta go.”
And just like that, the call ended, and Julia left Berlin and returned to Peridale. Most of the video calls ended in a hurry. Some featured Alfie, and others the friends Jessie was making along the way. Once, Jessie had called her, handed Julia to a baker in France, and a strange but entertaining twenty-minute conversation about baking techniques had followed. Most calls came at a civilised hour, but some didn’t. Those had livened up the late-night feeds in the early days, back when they’d missed each other terribly.
Julia still missed Jessie terribly.
She could tell Jessie was having too much fun to remember to miss home these days. And Julia was glad of it. When Jessie had first gone away, she’d called all the time, full of nerves and sometimes tears. She’d kept up to date with things going on in Peridale through social media, and most of the time was more in tune with the local gossip than Julia, who spent thos
e first few months in a home-shaped bubble with Barker and their newborn. Jessie had stopped bringing things up, which meant she’d stopped checking, and sometimes she didn’t even ask. On those days, Julia knew Jessie was probably living her life to the fullest.
“That girl is going to come home with more holes than a pin cushion,” Julia said, joining Sue in the grand kitchen currently doubling as a makeshift nursery.
“Huh?”
Sue immediately passed Olivia to Julia so she could tend to the twins fighting over the same toy horse.
“Jessie’s got more piercings,” Julia explained, eyeing her sister as she let Olivia bounce excitedly against her. “I didn’t mean to be so long. Kept losing signal.”
“It’s fine.” Sue pulled a screaming Pearl away from a screaming Dottie. “It’s not you. I’ve just had a lot going on lately.”
The girls continued to skreich while Vinnie lay on his front, thumping on a tablet computer, unbothered. The twins’ wailing set off Olivia, whose higher pitch was an almost unbearable addition to the orchestra of infant chaos.
Dottie, Pearl, and Vinnie would all turn three this year.
Time moved too quickly.
Julia clung tighter to Olivia as her daughter’s empty cries petered out.
They grow up too quickly.
When Sue had calmed the girls and placated them with separate toys, she collapsed against the island, arms stretched out, and exhaled. Julia suspected that if a pillow were handy, her sister might have screamed into it before going straight to sleep.
“First of all, I apologise for being a rubbish big sister,” Julia said, rubbing Sue’s back. “Something’s going on, and I should have noticed before it got to this point.”
“You’ve had a lot going on.” Sue looked up and the sight of Olivia seemed to soothe her. “She couldn’t even hold her head up properly not that long ago. At least mine can feed themselves.”
“I haven’t seen you as much lately, though.”
“I know.” Sue rested her forehead against the marble. “And I feel rubbish about it.”
“Then we both feel rubbish about not being there for each other. What do you need?”
